Parker is one of the oddest poet’s you’re likely to meet. With a hyperactive sense of humor and an irreverence to match, Parker creates poems that push so hard at their own boundaries, they’re likely to explode at any moment.

. . . so many tricks up his sleeve! (Which, by the way, is already lodged up a hand puppet.) What you must believe is that Parker is not a gimmicky poet. He uses these moves so smartly, I never felt peeved, just entertained, as though by clever cocktail conversation that could be called “sparkling” if it weren’t so dark. But this book isn’t merely clever—and this too is a word I don’t use in any pejorative sense—it’s frequently gorgeous and brilliant . . .

Hilarity in the vault! A man without a face and an ever-shifting position on things: sheer terror and comedy follow where "everywhere, divides."

—Fanny Howe

To read Karl Parker's poems is to revel in the tremendous reach of a mind that, more than any other I've read (more than John Clare, more than Khlebnikov or Kharms or Huerta) can render me awed at the realization that we, each of us, have a person inside our skins with us. Parker enacts this phenomenological remembering with such a wit and lyricism, and such a grief, that I believe him likely one of the smartest, saddest, funniest writers alive. He is without doubt one of my favorite writers. I have been following his work for years. And so will people for years to come.

—Gabriel Gudding

Karl Parker’s PERSONATIONSKIN makes for a strange and auspicious debut. The self in these poems tries on and discards one skin after another while Rome burns in the background—his fiddling indistinguishable from the burning. Joyous and agonized bodies dance through the funhouse, leaving sticky-note poems on distorting mirrors to mark their circular progress: “peel back the skin, back to the everything, the pale tenderest fleshpetal, where we are reeling still.” A broken umbrella in the face of major weather, a map of a landscape in which the difference is spreading: poems to make your flesh creep, to make you feel alive.

—Joshua Corey

Parker's jolting, often baffling assertions keep escorting you to the edge of some political or psychological cliff, where you glimpse an abyss into which a part of you or someone who has stolen your identity may already have jumped—and then yanking you back with a nudge in the ribs. It is funny—the way Samuel Beckett is funny. But wholly original. You don't want PERSONATIONSKIN to end because it keeps getting you to smile at the reasons why you might despair. It is a tender, good-natured, painfully discomfiting, and aesthetically exhilarating book.

—Jim Crenner

There are moments of human interaction that leave one with a sense of cosmic disconnection, as if the earth has stopped spinning, as a record would skip and scratch at a school dance. There is something so delicately transcendent in that shock. It’s like being hung-over and walking out into the twenty-below morning, a gasp. Karl Parker’s poems bring me as closer to that terror and transcendence than any other writer.

I think of Whitman rubbing his hide on tree bark, in both penance and ecstasy. The American elegy is tapered to a wick which burns back on itself. The edges of Parker’s writing shudder, as the skin shudders when it comes in contact with thorns—or caresses. But it is beyond good and evil. Many voices hash this out. There is Beckett reciting Shakespeare, Paul Celan reading Dylan Thomas. Voices plummet from the heavens. They are eloquent and rational, and they hold back tears. The personating fills that void with bodies and consciousness. That brings them even closer to, and makes them the membrane between body and self. They engineer earthly structure to support the weight of regret and hope. Parker’s poems are some of the most delicate and dangerous that exist. In their sublime instants, we are both present and complete.

—William Pettit, Tarano, Italy 3/09

AUTOBIOGRAPHIA

That was prettymuch the story of my life
in profile. I keep thinking about glass, but don’t know what to say
when continually thugs come to me in a dark alley
disguised as you, only a you made of glass
shattering back together. But all that’s behind me now, I’m
much better
than I was, a study in human behaviour of the particular sort
of person who says and does these things
in public, which is the region of my soul, O thou. I
consider this more like drawing
a picture of someone drawing
water from a well that figures prominently in a children’s book
about the ins and outs of rigor mortis
and their relationship to fucking. Ouch,
or excuse me, I erupted again. That’s not the right word:
life is scared. Dogs only rarely eat other dogs, it’s just
a myth about our time, like the fish
that ate Pittsburgh. I was born underwater
eventually, wherever, found chattering in brightgreen reeds. That’s
the honest truth. I work for the city, too,
you guessed it, a tax collector, but right, who cares.
Each sketch is action in a frame advancing
without expectation, in other words, without end.